The Dynamic Grunfeld
Submitted by
on Fri, 05/08/2009 at 9:36am.
After watching a very interesting DVD from Alexei Shirov on the Grunfeld I decided to pick up the Grunfeld again. His clear explanations about his games, but also about the way the opening is supposed to be played (with very dynamic chess, often not worrying about pawns or exchanges) really inspired me. The way he presented his games made it seem that, although of course white has sharp and critical tries for an advantage, black should not really be worse in any (or at least most) of the variations. And who am I to doubt the assessments of such a supergrandmaster? :)
Anyway, I decided to give it a quick try myself too online, and luckily in the 5-minute pool on ICC I was paired with an opponent who was not afraid to play main lines and who played 1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 d5 4. cxd5 Nxd5 5. e4 heading for a Grunfeld. Although the game is far from perfect and not close to as good as Shirov's, I would still like to share it with you, since I managed to get a good position against an IM quite easily, by just following the advice of playing dynamically. Below is the game with annotations.